Over the past week I have been preparing my Article Rewriting WordPress plugin for public release. It’s been nice seeing it come together the way it has. So far I have 30 people that have been issued API Keys and most of them have already started using it. I tried to find people that have had experience with other article rewriting software so they could give me feedback on what they think.

Out of those 30, I have had 6 people give me feedback on it so far. In summary, they love it! To be honest I haven’t tried other article rewriting (or article spinners they sometimes call them) that are out on the market. I have always been the kind of person that finds flaws in other people’s programming so I’m never happy untill I make my own. I figured that this plugin (or the Web Ninja Article Rewriting API depending on which you would be using) is more feature rich then the most but I didn’t really think it was that much superior till I started getting some feedback on it. Apparently, I must be the only one that runs a rewritten article through a grammar checker. :/ I don’t know, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

First of all, sorry I have not had the chance to do a little write up on this yet. With the Christmas Holiday and all that in-tales I have been pretty busy. Most of you may have already noticed the release of a new plugin about a week ago: the Web Ninja Auto Tagging System plugin. What you don’t know is why this one is a lot better then most of the existing auto tagging plugins for WordPress.Continue Reading »

Your Trash is a function that was added in WordPress 2.9. When an item (post, comment, etc) is deleted, it goes in Trash instead of being permanently removed. You can easily tell your WordPress blog to automatically empty trash every X days.

Just open your wp-config.php file (located at the root of your WordPress install) and paste the following code:

define('EMPTY_TRASH_DAYS', 10 );

The second parameter is when to empty trash, in days. So in this example it will empty your trash automatically every 10 days. And if we want to completely disable the trash? You can put a zero as your second parameter.

Looks like WordPress is getting a little update happy again. Last time this happened they updated every 3 days for like 2 weeks… At least this time the updates are only 7 days apart. :/ Anyways, both my released plugins have no problem with the new update and are working just fine.

Now on to the good stuff! A nice fairy tale.

Once upon a time, in a land not very far away, Google had a PageRank API where you could query their system for a website’s Google PageRank. Well, for reasons I’m not going to go into details with, they removed that API. This left a lot of people sad and not knowing what to do.

WordPress has a smart way of making sure the comment count that is displayed on your site loads quick without actually having to query the comment table. Which means faster load times. Here is how they do it:

About Me and My Sandbox

My name is Josh Fowler. Actually, that’s Josh “Uber” Fowler to some. :) I have been a Web Developer for well over 15 years now. And in those 15 years I can say that I may have learned a thing or twelve. I have decided that it was about time to start sharing some of the things that I have learned and a few of the things that I have made. Hopefully they will all show up here in my personal sandbox and I hope you enjoy them all!